What do babysitting coops and liquidity traps have in common? Lots, according to Paul Krugman. In The Return of Depression Economics, the MIT professor looks at the alarming string of financial crises that plagued various economies around the globe in the 1990s, especially the Asian contagion, and sees an "eerie resemblance to the Great Depression." Instead of the "new world order" promised by the triumph of capitalism over socialism, "the world economy has turned out to be a much more dangerous place than we imagined."

Krugman uses the example of a Washington, D.C., babysitting coop to explain the dynamics of recession and inflation. He examines the remarkable emergence of Asia and the precursors to the Asian mess—the Tequila Effect of the mid-'90s that began in Mexico and Japan's fall in the early '90s into an economic malaise. He then analyzes the underlying reasons for the collapse of the Thai baht and other Asian currencies as well as the subsequent actions of the IMF and the murky role of hedge funds. In the end, Krugman sees the return of depression economics, which "means that for the first time in two generations, failures on the demand side of the economy—insufficient private spending to make use of the available productive capacity—have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for a large part of the world." It's the same problem that was at the root of the 1930s depression. And while it took a world war to solve that problem, Krugman sees solutions that are far less dramatic but that do require a willingness to chuck obsolete doctrines and think about old problems in new ways.

Over the years, Krugman has earned a well-deserved reputation for translating the jargon that economists speak into something that anyone with an interest—not necessarily a Ph.D.—can understand. The Return of Depression Economicsis another timely testament to Krugman's ability to read and interpret the tea leaves of today's global economy. Highly recommended. —Harry C. Edwards

Although it is one of the major achievements in the history of economic thought, the general equilibrium model is not completely satisfactory as a descriptive tool. In the 1970s several economists settled on a new way to study economic relationships that is often called the "economics of information." The theory of contracts is one of its main building blocks.

The theory of contracts uses partial equilibrium models that take into account the full complexity of strategic interactions between privately informed agents in well-defined institutional settings. The models sum up the constraints imposed by the prevailing institutional setting through a contract, either explicit or implicit. They make intensive use of noncooperative game theory with asymmetric information.

The Economics of Contractsintroduces graduate students and nonspecialist professional economists to the theory of contracts. It grew out of a course Professor Salanié gave to third-year Stanford graduate students and third-year students at the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique. The book focuses on the methods used to analyze the models, but also discusses a few of the many applications the theory has generated in various fields of economics. The author's goal is to give readers the basic tools to create their own applications.

Since his pioneering application of economic analysis to racial discrimination, Gary S. Becker has shown that an economic approach can provide a unified framework for understanding all human behavior. In a highly readable selection of essays Becker applies this approach to various aspects of human activity, including social interactions; crime and punishment; marriage, fertility, and the family; and "irrational" behavior.

"Becker's highly regarded work in economics is most notable in the imaginative application of 'the economic approach' to a surprising breadth of human activity. Becker's essays over the years have inevitably inspired a surge of research activity in testimony to the richness of his insights into human activities lying 'outside' the traditionally conceived economic markets. Perhaps no economist in our time has contributed more to expanding the area of interest to economists than Becker, and a number of these thought-provoking essays are collected in this book."—Choice

Gary Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1992.

Do events of the 1930s carry a message for the 1990s? Lessons from the Great Depressionprovides an integrated view of the depression, covering the experience in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. It describes the causes of the depression, why it was so widespread and prolonged, and what brought about eventual recovery.

Peter Temin also finds parallels in recent history, in the relentless deflationary course followed by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and the British government in the early 1980s, and in the dogged adherence by the Reagan administration to policies generated by a discredited economic theory - supply-side economics.

Peter Temin is Professor of Economics at MIT.

Rapidly changing technology, the globalization of markets, and the declining role of unions are just some of the factors that have led to dramatic changes in working conditions in the United States. Little attention has been paid to the difficult measurement problems underlying analysis of the labor market. Labor Statistics Measurement Issueshelps to fill this gap by exploring key theoretical and practical issues in the measurement of employment, wages, and workplace practices.

Some of the chapters in this volume explore the conceptual issues of what is needed, what is known, or what can be learned from existing data, and what needs have not been met by available data sources. Others make innovative uses of existing data to analyze these topics. Also included are papers examining how answers to important questions are affected by alternative measures used and how these can be reconciled. This important and useful book will find a large audience among labor economists and consumers of labor statistics.

Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex postselection and learning than on ex antecalculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.

Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change explicitly. Drawing on a deep knowledge of economic and technological history as well as the tools of economic analysis, Nelson exposes the intimate connections among government policies, science-based universities, and the growth of technology. He compares national innovation systems, and explores both the rise of the United States as the world's premier technological power during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the diminishing of that lead as other countries have largely caught up.

Lucid, wide-ranging, and accessible, the book examines the secrets of economic growth and why the U.S. economy has been anemic since the early 1970s.

Integrating a contemporary approach to econometrics with the powerful computational tools offered by Stata, An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata focuses on the role of method-of-moments estimators, hypothesis testing, and specification analysis and provides practical examples that show how the theories are applied to real data sets using Stata. As an expert in Stata, the author successfully guides readers from the basic elements of Stata to the core econometric topics. He first describes the fundamental components needed to effectively use Stata. The book then covers the multiple linear regression model, linear and nonlinear Wald tests, constrained least-squares estimation, Lagrange multiplier tests, and hypothesis testing of nonnested models. Subsequent chapters center on the consequences of failures of the linear regression model's assumptions. The book also examines indicator variables, interaction effects, weak instruments, underidentification, and generalized method-of-moments estimation. The final chapters introduce panel-data analysis and discrete- and limited-dependent variables and the two appendices discuss how to import data into Stata and Stata programming. Presenting many of the econometric theories used in modern empirical research, this introduction illustrates how to apply these concepts using Stata. The book serves both as a supplementary text for undergraduate and graduate students and as a clear guide for economists and financial analysts.

Students in both the natural and social sciences often seek regression models to explain the frequency of events, such as visits to a doctor, auto accidents or job hiring. This analysis provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of models and methods to interpret such data. The authors combine theory and practice to make sophisticated methods of analysis accessible to practitioners working with widely different types of data and software. The treatment will be useful to researchers in areas such as applied statistics, econometrics, operations research, actuarial studies, demography, biostatistics, and quantitatively-oriented sociology and political science. The book may be used as a reference work on count models or by students seeking an authoritative overview. The analysis is complemented by template programs available on the Internet through the authors' homepages.

Over fifty years ago,Vannevar Bush released his enormously influential report, Science, the Endless Frontier, which asserted a dichotomy between basic and applied science. This view was at the core of the compact between government and science that led to the golden age of scientific research after World War II—a compact that is currently under severe stress. In this book, Donald Stokes challenges Bush's view and maintains that we can only rebuild the relationship between government and the scientific community when we understand what is wrong with that view.

Stokes begins with an analysis of the goals of understanding and use in scientific research. He recasts the widely accepted view of the tension between understanding and use, citing as a model case the fundamental yet use-inspired studies by which Louis Pasteur laid the foundations of microbiology a century ago. Pasteur worked in the era of the "second industrial revolution," when the relationship between basic science and technological change assumed its modern form. Over the subsequent decades, technology has been increasingly science-based. But science has been increasingly technology-base—with the choice of problems and the conduct of research often inspired by societal needs. An example is the work of the quantum-effects physicists who are probing the phenomena of semiconductors from the time of the transistor's discovery after World War II.

On this revised, interactive view of science and technology, Stokes builds a convincing case that by recognizign the importance of use-inspired basic research we can frame a new compact between science and government. His conclusions have major implications for both the scientific and policy communities and will be of great interest to those in the broader public who are troubled by the current role of basic science in American democracy.